VULNERABLE MISSION

The King’s English in a Tamil Tongue:
Missions, Paternalism, and Hybridity in
South India 1
DYron DaughritY
This paper looks at problems that have occurred in Church of Christ missions by focusing on a case study
in India called the Arise Shine Church of Christ Mission. The paper argues that paternalism in a cappella
church missions has led to a “time capsule effect” wherein churches in India have become stultified.
Indian Church of Christ members have developed a hybrid identity. They try to be faithful to the sending
churches—in this case Canada’s valiant missionary J. C. Bailey—but they have to balance it with
faithfulness to their own culture. Several issues are brought forth such as Bible translations (especially the
use of the King James Version), contextualization and indigenization, and the unfortunate dependency that
often arises in Church of Christ missions efforts.
To begin, I will share a quotation from the person described by Christianity Today
as “the most important person you don’t know.” 2 Andrew Walls is the dean of the
relatively new discipline that I work in, known as world Christianity, or global Christianity.
Walls is a Scottish, Oxbridge educated scholar who went to Sierra Leone in 1957
to serve as a church history professor in a colonial college. What he witnessed in Africa
changed his understanding of Christianity and gave birth to a new academic discipline.
While “happily pontificating” on early Christianity, Walls came to realize he “was actually
living in a second-century church.” 3 Africans were rapidly turning to Christ, and he
was a front-row observer. He began to see that the Christianity his British compatriots
had established was becoming translated and assimilated to the local context in creative,
unpredictable ways. Africa was becoming the Christian heartland of the world, but it
was complex, uncontrolled, vibrantly new, and unsettled.
Walls has made a career out of analyzing how Christianity gets translated and indigenized
in new cultures. In his view, this is the genius of Christianity; its “translatability.”
Walls’s ideas overhauled the field of church history to the point that most classic models
are now obsolete. His work has impacted the discipline to the point that no longer can
the history of Christians be told in an exclusively Western framework: Acts to Augustine
to Aquinas to Luther to Wesley to Barth. Now, church history should be told in all its
manifold greatness and extreme diversity. At Pepperdine I advertise my World Christianity
course as a study of Christianity that moves from South Korea to South America,
from South Africa to South Carolina.
1 This article began as a paper presentation for Baylor University’s 2011 conference “The King James Bible
and the World it Made, 1611–2011.” A second, expanded draft of the paper was presented at Pepperdine
University’s National Endowment of the Humanities-funded conference “Manifold Greatness: The Creation
and Afterlife of the King James Bible” in September 2012.
2 Tim Stafford, “Historian Ahead of His Time,” Christianity Today (February 2007): http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/february/34.87.html.
See also William Burrows, Mark Gornik, and Janice McLean,
eds., Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F. Walls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011).
3 Stafford, 2.
MISSIO DEI 4.1 (FEBRUARY 2012): 89–109